Guest review by Tracey Mathias: THE OVERSTORY by Richard Powers

"A novel for the Anthropocene, for an age of mass extinction brought about by human action: it portrays Nature as we need to understand it now: not as stable and enduring but in a state of catastrophic change."

Tracey Mathias grew up in Cardiff but has lived for more than half her life in London. She has three grown-up daughters, and has been writing for children since they were small. She is writer in residence at the DaCapo Music Foundation, writing song lyrics and performance pieces, and is the author of the fantasy trilogy Assalay. Her latest book is Silence is Also a Lie (originally published as Night of the Party) – a Young Adult love story, mystery and political dystopia set in a near future England.

 

The Overstory deeply impressed and affected me on first reading: I have already reread it and imagine that I’ll return to it more than once in the future. It feels like a necessary book for our age, and one that opens up possibilities for what can be done with fiction. 

There are so many things to admire here. Powers’s prose is beautiful, precise and lyrical. He interweaves the stories of a large cast of characters with skill and poise: introducing them in a series of vivid biographical vignettes and then following them over a broad sweep of time from early years to late adulthood. But more than anything, I am struck by the ways that he imagines and writes the natural world. 

The trees and forests that dominate the novel are described with the kind of clarity and loveliness that comes from close observation. The ‘pinnate leaves’ of an ash tree ‘feather the light and make life feel softer than it is.’ The trunk of a redwood is ‘a triple wide door of darkness into the side of the night.’ In the ‘twilight-green’ air of an ancient forest ‘clicks and chatter disturb the cathedral hush.’ 

These descriptions are not static, either, but full of dynamic life. There’s a running theme about time and the relativity of time here. The novel’s computer genius (whose pioneering games act as analogies for so much else: codes branch; a bestselling game involves the competitive extraction of value from a virtual Earth) remembers a snippet of sci-fi. A race of aliens move so fast that ‘Earth seconds seem to them like years’ and humans ‘nothing but sculptures of immobile meat.’ By analogy, we must see trees in ‘tree time’ to understand them not as static, but as active, moving and purposeful beings, and the energy and vibrancy of Powers’s language does just this: a chestnut ‘spirals’ into the sky; trees in a forest ‘fight for scraps of light’; the roots of Douglas firs ‘run into each other underground.’ And Powers doesn’t only give us poetic description, but poetic science. The book is rich in fascinating botanical detail, especially in those passages written from the perspective of a plant scientist whose major interest is the social life of trees: the ways in which they communicate, co-operate and form communities. 

So narrative doesn’t just belong to humans: trees have their own stories of change and relationship. They’re also deeply entwined with human stories (the novel itself takes the form of a tree, imagining human life as roots, trunk, crown and seeds). Trees are emblems and instruments of human history, love, fate, tragedy, and there’s a hint of mystical connection, in the synchronous flourishing and declining of people and trees. 

But, crucially, this is also a relationship of tragedy and damage. The Overstory is a novel for the Anthropocene, for an age of mass extinction brought about by human action: it portrays Nature as we need to understand it now: not as stable and enduring but in a state of catastrophic change. The novel is elegiac, all its beauty threated with the awareness of what we have lost and stand to lose. Some of the most painful passages in Roots describe the blight that wiped out the great chestnut forests of the US east coast, and the main driver of the plot is the protest against the felling of virgin redwood forest on the West Coast. Powers offers no easy reassurance for the future. There is, one character reflects, a war between trees and humans ‘over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.’ 

Beautiful, painful, urgent: this is an important book.

The Overstory is published by Vintage.

Independent Bookseller Feature No.3: The Book Corner, Halifax. UNDER THE ROCK and THE GALLOWS POLE by Benjamin Myers

We opened The Book Corner in September 2017 with Bookworms, our dedicated children’s bookshop, next door. We are proud to have brought an independent bookshop back to Halifax and are located in the recently renovated Grade I listed Piece Hall, the only example in this country of the great eighteenth century northern cloth halls.

The shop is owned by Kate Claughan who also owns The Bookcase in Hebden Bridge. The team are avid readers and all-round book champions, passionate about delivering events that offer something extra for the local community whether it be a local author book signing, a poetry collection launch, a spoken word open-mic night, a regular YA book club or a good old-fashioned story-time for younger readers.

We are also delighted to partner Square Chapel Arts Centre supporting their various events for authors and poets including Hollie McNish, Roger McGough, Willy Russell and Stuart Maconie.

We have chosen to review two books by local author Benjamin Myers. Ben is an author, journalist and poet who has written seven books as well as many poems and short stories. His novel The Gallows Pole has just won the 2018 Walter Scott Prize and is our best-selling fiction title. Ben recently collaborated with ‘Yorkshire’s very own Wainwright’ and cartographer, Christopher Goddard, to create a Cragg Vale Coiners map, a sweeping walker’s guide to the locations featured in the novel. It is well worth a trek through the blustery bogs and banks to experience the incredible Calder Valley but always with a hip flask close at hand.

The Gallows Pole is a visceral re-telling of the Cragg Vale Coiners’ efforts to ‘clip’ the late 18th century England’s economy into devastation. Myers delivers a windswept tale of 1769 Northern England, diving head first into the murky world of pseudo King David Hartley and his gang of land-workers as they bully and spit their enterprising scheme across the Calder Valley. No man will stand in their way, but can they avoid the hangman’s noose? Deeply resonant for the modern reader, this is a vivid portrait of the working man and his uprising against the rich establishment. Myers has woven an unforgettable tale filled with landscape, poetry and Yorkshire vernacular that has you grasped by the throat long after the final page has been turned. A worthy winner of the 2018 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.

Under the Rock is the most beautifully written non fiction book. Reading it takes you on a journey into the West Yorkshire village of Mytholmroyd which is situated in the steep sided Calder valley. Scout Rock, is present as a constant companion. The author lives below it; his relationship to the rock is examined throughout the book. The rock has also affected others who live in the valley, most famously Ted Hughes. The observations on nature are glorious whilst not flinching from describing the raw and gritty side. The book is split into parts: Wood, Earth, Water, Rock. At the end of each part are poems which make you feel as if you accompanied the author on his walks around the valley. There is an extremely powerful sense of place. I was fully immersed in the landscape, the water, the woods, the rock. Lyrical, powerful, engaging, moving and fascinating. Highly recommended.

The Gallows Pole is published by Bluemoose Books and Under the Rock by Elliott & Thomson.

Review by Katie Ashwood and Louise Beere.

Guest review by Paula Knight: THE OUTRUN by Amy Liptrot

"The tug of love between urban and rural life is what stitched me into the core of this book." 

Paula Knight is an author, illustrator and comics creator. She has illustrated over 60 children’s books and written three picture books.

Her latest book, The Facts of Life, is a graphic novel memoir for adults, published in 2017 by Myriad Editions after six years in the making. An extract of it reached Myriad’s inaugural First Graphic Novel competition in 2012, chosen by judges including Ian Rankin, Corinne Pearlman and Steve Bell. She was awarded an Arts Council England grant for the work.

Paula is currently exploring new ways of working within her limits of being semi-disabled due to chronic illness. She is also an enthusiastic amateur photographer interested in nature, wildlife and abstraction. The former and latter are likely on a creative collision course - albeit tethered in sketchbooks waiting to be set free.

IG (Illustration): @paulajkstudio
IG (Photography): @paulajknight
Twitter: @Paula_JKnight
www.paulaknight.co.uk

As a city dweller who nurses romantic notions of living somewhere less peopled, I’d been meaning to read this for a while. I’ve long been interested in ‘overcoming adversity’ memoirs since reading Maya Angelou’s autobiography in my twenties. I’m also a wildlife lover and bird-fan (albeit not a fully fledged twitcher), so there was much to absorb me in this book.

Liptrot’s memoir is set in Orkney and London, and springs from a backdrop of extremes: her father’s mental illness; her parents’ separation; her mother’s subsequent religious fervour; and the author’s struggles with addiction. The opening pages take place on Mainland’s airstrip: Her father is waiting to be taken to a mental institution in Aberdeen as her mother arrives to introduce his newborn daughter (Liptrot). This sets the tone and premise for her story - one of leaving and returning, excess and retreat.

The book continues with Liptrot’s return to the island after a young adulthood spent partying in London. A mingling of childhood memories with exposition of the island’s landscape and wildlife is not only a backdrop to her story but the very fabric of it. The prose is pure without being flowery or too sentimental, and her close knowledge and respect for the wild Orcadian landscape is evident. She recalls memories of rural life and how, as a teenager, she yearned to spread her wings. Migrate she did - and the book tells of her chaotic life in London descending into alcohol addiction, difficult relationships, lack of direction and a distressing adverse event that is the catalyst for her return to Orkney in search of healing.

The narrative structure moves between how she spent her time on the islands and how life unfolded then imploded in London, including time attending AA meetings.

What I found most gratifying about this book was how Liptrot makes sense of her life in the seamless connections between nature and the human condition, and the enlightenment that can be gained from recognising these introjections of states. She likens the destructive action of ‘shoaling’ waves eroding the cliffs to the physiological effects of alcoholism on her body, which exacerbated seizures; and how geological tremors felt by islanders were tied up with the myth of the destructive Stoor Worm. Facts about Orkney are intertwined with folklore, mythology and stories of shipwrecksm suggesting that Liptrot is similarly washed up in this landscape from her own personal storm. Although some metaphors are explicitly explained, there is plenty of room for readers to make their own connections. For example, Liptrot engages in conservation work counting the elusive corncrake by listening for their calls at night. I interpreted this as a metaphor for personal desolation - a casting around in the dark for reassurance from at least one solitary voice confirming that life is still thriving in the gloom. The corncrake doesn’t want to be found, but it is a human need to know that the world is in order with everything in its rightful place. This is the crux of how Liptrot sets anchor - by engaging in nature; in what is real.

The tug of love between urban and rural life is what stitched me into the core of this book. The damage wreaked by alcoholism in the wilds of a heaving city versus retreating back to the expansive skies of her Orkney homeland in search of recovery is perhaps a cliche. However, Liptrot explores this in a way that throws out assumptions of rural romanticism as healer and city life as destructor. I appreciated how nature was not offered on a plate as a magical cure-all and that she makes clear that recovery is an ongoing process.

Liptrot writes about being drawn to ‘the edge’, and throughout the course of the book she at once moves geographically closer to it and metaphorically further from it: By eventually choosing to inhabit one of Orkney’s most northerly islands, Papa Westray, her deep immersion in the natural world facilitates her turning away from a life lived on the edge of self-destruction. It’s truly a human/ nature story - one that defines how the two are in no way separable.

Despite being left with no illusions as to the potential challenges of life in a remote and wild location, I still found myself searching Orkney house prices on the internet for a few weeks after reading The Outrun. The book confirmed a distinct notion that it’s as plausible to suffer loneliness living in close proximity to millions of human beings as it is on a far-flung island with mainly wildlife for company. The latter seems more palatable to me.

The Outrun is published by Canongate. 

Read our review of Paula Knight's The Facts of Life here.